Auburn running back JaTarvious Whitlow: "Nobody wanted to lose to Oregon. We feel like that's a bad reputation on them. What are they, ACC? Pac-12? I didn't even know what they were. A Pac-12 team coming in and beating an SEC team, we can't take that." https://t.co/VlVzbhgQAF

How many other schools could have a line written about them like, “And only Auburn, with its long and storied tradition of athletic dysfunction…” and have it ring true?

Well, to start with, it helps to hire the right kind of people.

Only Pearl, with his florid history of failing to adhere to recruiting parameters, could end up involved in this one. He was fired at Tennessee in 2011 after lying about having two recruits at his house for a cookout when the recruiting calendar did not permit it. Fifteen years ago, when he was at Milwaukee, the school turned in a secondary violation for an impermissible contact with a recruit that was cut from the same cloth — attending a function at Pearl’s house.

It seemingly never hurts to be brazen about it — brazenness being a useful tool to deploy on occasion that certain schools, which shall remain nameless, have never appeared to grasp in their dealings with the NCAA. Of course, the risk you run with brazenness is you never know when you hit your limits, but then again, if you don’t care that much, that’s not really much of a risk, amirite?